Rewire

As the tale is told, during the crusades, a monk was asked how soldiers could separate the Catholics from their enemy. The monk infamously replied, “Kill them all. For the Lord knows them that are His,” the anecdotal origins of the phrase “Kill them all, let God sort it out.”

We’re in the midst of a new crusade, just as religious, and growing to be just as dangerous – the crusade against sexuality, fertility and human rights. Sex, our newly empowered conservative leaders seem to believe, is something that should only happen for procreation, should never involve people who aren’t either married or willing to be married should they get pregnant, and should definitely never occur for the sake of pleasure and intimacy.

To push their agenda, they’ve replaced their swords with the newest and sharpest weapons they own – their tax dollars. Their new rallying cry is to defund: Defund Planned Parenthood! Defund Sex Ed! Defund Websites! Defund Prenatal Care! Defund WIC! Anything that in any way is associated with the sex or procreation with which they disagree should be defunded, disbanned and eliminated.

Even when these projects actually support their goals.

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They state they want to eliminate abortions, then demand defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides the very services and supplies most needed to prevent unintended pregnancies. In Indiana, they are willing to give up over one million dollars in family planning and reproductive health care funding for low-income residents, simply to ensure Planned Parenthood does not receive the other three million. Thousands of women will lose the ability to obtain affordable birth control so that money that never went to abortions will now disappear entirely in order to “guarantee” it doesn’t go to abortions.

In Oklahoma, they will literally take the food out of babies’ mouths to ensure “their” tax dollars don’t go to the health care provider. They would rather cut off a supplier of formula for low income babies, endangering the health of the infants about which they care so greatly, on a crusade to stop other “babies” from being “murdered” by birth control pills and IUDs.

In Nebraska, the concern for the unborn stopped the moment it became an issue of citizenship. Rather than potentially provide health care to women who might be in the country illegally, the state stripped prenatal care from the lowest-income women, affecting not just potential illegal immigrants, and not just their children, who would be citizens of the United States, but a group of the absolute poorest women in the state – women who were in fact citizens and caught in the anti-immigration backlash. No tax dollars that could potentially go to illegal immigrants, they argued. Defund it all. When the state had their first rash of stillborns in decades, they shook their heads and refused to change their minds. Not with my tax dollars.

Now, in Massachusetts, they are demanding the removal of a website that provides teens with information on sex, preventing pregnancy and STI’s, and options if a girl gets pregnant. They call it disgusting, crude, and obscene because it uses actual terms a teenager would use when having sex, like “cum.” They call it pornographic for showing how to put on male and female condoms properly. They claim it advocates for secret abortions, despite the fact that it encourages young girls to first try to talk to their parents, tells them to consider adoption, and explains resources for raising a baby on her own. They ignore that it encourages abstinence, that it promotes personal responsibility.

“Defund it!” they demand. “Not with my tax dollars.”

Defund it all. It doesn’t matter if it will hurt teens, women, men. It doesn’t matter if it provides information that could protect future fertility, that groups help prevent unintended pregnancy that will bring down abortion rates. It doesn’t matter if they provide food to babies, health care to mothers, help healthy infants be born into stable lives, or help teens simply be teens and not parents.

It doesn’t matter if innocent victims are affected in their zeal to end sex for any reason but procreation.